Perhaps I erred in entering a discussion of fisheries issues with a political post, but since others were not separating the two, what the heck, I say.

I agree with Deerhawk that if fish are the concern, then fish should stay the concern without regard to politics and partisanship. Separate science and policy-- that's been my point for a long time and something that a lot of folks on this board don't appreciate. Too often I see posts where the Bush administration (actually the federal government) makes a proposal, and it's condemned immediately by folks who don't have a clue simply because it was a Bush administration proposal. That's B.S. from a science standpoint, and that was the intent of my original post in this thread.

An example of this was a change in the approval of chemicals for agricultural use. The E.P.A. decided to abandon a lengthy approval process by not bouncing it off every ESA species that might be concerned. This was widely hailed as an attack on the environment by the John "Every Tree Is A Chapel" Kerry crowd as an attack on salmon. Further investigation showed that the abandoned rules were so stringent, time-consuming and useless (or nearly so from what I read) that the EPA hadn't been using them at all for 10 years (that's back in the Clinton administration for those who went pursued a liberal education and are mathematically challenged)-- well before they were dumped by the feds.

Another hue-and-cry was raised recently when the Center for Disease Control issued a report/statement that said the mercury warnings for fish consumption we've heard so much about the past few years were inaccurate at best. The report indicated there were no (that's zero for the libs) reports of mercury poisoning and that the levels in fish were not above FDA guidelines. The HAC I heard said this was just another move on the Bush admin's part to rape and pillage the U.S. environment. Yet, the CDC is about as agenda free as it gets in this country-- it's more concerned with doing away measles and smallpox and things like that. I mean, c'mon folks, stop building hats out of tin foil and read beyond the scare headlines.

And OC-- if being a "flyfishing republican" means I'll get a 5,000 square-foot home built of old growth on Lake Samammish, then I'm gonna sell my gear rods and vote a straight party ticket. I could parlay that sucker into a trailer pad in Forks, a cabin in Ketchikan, a pied a terre on the Little Blackfoot and have enough left over for a little shotgun house on the Gulf Coast. Yes, indeed.

As for working for less than 6% in the Columbia, I'm more interested in getting rid of all commercial fishermen in the Northwest. Zero percent is much better than 2 % any day.